For the Sake of Their Baby (11 page)

“Then you didn’t leave the bathroom window open?”

“No. I’ll check the outside tomorrow to see if I can tell if it was jimmied. Anyway, after Kapp kidnaps our cat and breaks Sinbad’s leg, he tampers with the stairs. Everyone knows what a softy you are for Sinbad. Then he pretends to be across town when he’s probably hiking back to his car—who’s to know where he really is? You come home, do exactly what he had planned, you die.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why does he want me dead? That doesn’t make any sense. And hiking around to his car seems dangerous—anyone could see him and how would he explain it?”

Alex had plopped down on a chair by now and he ran a hand through his hair. He shook his head.

“Suppose the sheriff is guilty of this crime,” she continued. “What if what he really wanted was for you to climb down the stairs instead of me?”

“The only reason the man would want either one of us dead is to cover up his murder of your uncle and when he killed your uncle—”

“If he killed my uncle—”

“
If
he killed your uncle, he took pains to frame
you.
Remember the scarf.”

Liz rubbed her eyes. “Maybe.”

“I think the first step is for me to go down those stairs
tomorrow morning and see if I can tell for sure if someone tampered with them.”

“Isn’t it dangerous?”

He grinned. “Probably. I’ll use my handy dandy rope. If the stairs have been messed with, then I guess you’re right, I guess we better tell the cops.”

Liz said, “No.”

Now he looked startled. “What?”

“The sheriff tried to scare me by making me think you were after my uncle’s money and that you might try to hurt me. If he’s innocent, his first thought is going to be that you did this. If he’s guilty, then he’ll make sure it looks like you did it because right now, an attempted murder charge would be a nice way for him to get rid of you again.”

“There’s your safety to consider,” he said firmly.

“Let me win this one,” she said, rubbing her eyes again. The stress of the day was beginning to take its toll. “Promise me you won’t go down that cliff until I’m awake and can help you,” she said, rising.

He stood as well and smiling, smoothed a lock of hair away from her face. “You look bushed.”

“I am.”

“In the future, we have to work together, Liz. Everything depends on figuring this out and finding a way to prove it. When I think about what could have happened if I hadn’t gotten here in time—”

She put her fingers against his lips. “But you did. You saved me.”

He kissed her fingers and looked at her in such a way that she felt her insides melt. He’d always had a way with her and she was pretty sure he knew it. But he didn’t push his advantage and she was half relieved and half saddened.

He said, “You resent my having saved you, don’t you?”

“Don’t be crazy. If you hadn’t come along, I probably would have fallen and broken my neck. I can’t imagine what would have happened to our baby.”

He nodded, but there was a look in his eyes she couldn’t identify.

“I thanked you,” she said softly. “I meant it.”

“I know you did. But part of you resents needing me.”

Part of her was afraid that through no fault of his own, he wouldn’t be around to be needed, so maybe he was right, maybe part of her resisted becoming too dependent on him. She bit her lip.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I think I understand. But I’m not going away. Just remember that.”

“It’s not that easy and you know it,” she said.

He grinned the old Alex grin. “I know. Good night, try not to worry.”

“What do I have to worry about? Almost dying today? Sinbad living through the night? Or maybe about which one of us is going to wind up in jail for killing my uncle?”

He shook his head.

Long after she’d slipped into bed, she heard him prowling the house, inside and out, checking windows and doors. His concern both frightened and comforted her. She fell asleep wishing he’d knock on her door, or maybe just break it down, wishing he’d demand she let him in, taking the decision to be wise and cautious away from her, putting her destiny in his hands where in her heart of hearts, she knew it belonged.

She fell asleep with tears in her eyes.

A
LEX PULLED UP
the rope that still dangled over the edge of the cliff and checked every inch of it. It wasn’t enough that it appeared to be just as he left it the night before. He didn’t trust that whomever had plotted the first “accident” hadn’t come back during the night to wreak more havoc.

It looked okay. Within minutes, he was scaling the side of the bluff, using muscles now sore from the exertion of the day before. By the time he pulled himself back up to the first landing, he knew for sure that Liz’s misadventure had been no accident.

He’d already discovered scratch marks on the trim outside the bathroom window and now this. Fury flared in his gut. Someone had tried to kill Liz. She must know something about her uncle’s murder that the true killer was afraid would come out during a new investigation. She was in danger because of the new trial. If anything happened to her because of him—

Well, it wouldn’t. He wouldn’t let it.

He quickly made his way up to the top of the cliff where he found Liz just as he’d left her, wrapped in a coat against the drizzly winter day, arms wrapped around herself. She looked very pregnant and very vulnerable. He surmounted his desire to run to her, to wrap her in his arms and protect her from who knew who or for what reason….

“It’s obvious someone sawed through the underpinning down there,” he told her as he worked the snug leather gloves off his hands and shoved them in his back pocket.

Liz wrinkled her brow. She looked completely washed-out to him, almost wan, and he wished he could dare tell her to spend the day resting. He knew she wouldn’t; it was probable that she couldn’t, given the
events of the past twenty-four hours. She was on edge, and frankly, she had every right to be so. He crossed mental fingers that her call to the vet’s office would result in good news.

“If I had been…hurt…wouldn’t the authorities have checked for signs of sabotage?” she asked. “Wouldn’t they have investigated?”

“Maybe the investigation would have been conducted by the sheriff’s office and maybe the sheriff knew he could control the outcome,” Alex said, knowing that he had no real proof that Kapp had had anything to do with it.

“I guess…”

A new thought entered his mind and refused to budge. “Or maybe they would have found just what they expected to find,” he said, alarm rising in his throat. He took off for the garage, Liz behind him.

He found what he was looking for laying carelessly on his workbench, an old chisel with white paint chips covering the metal tip. He stared at it like it was a bomb which he expected the would-be assassin had intended it to be.

Liz caught up with him as his gaze lifted to the peg board hanging on the wall behind the work bench, to the two wood-cutting saws he kept there. Sure enough, the larger of the two had fresh wood caught in its teeth. A sprinkle of sawdust had been dislodged when the saw was placed back on its hooks and lay scattered across the cluttered bench.

“What—” Liz said, but then it must have struck her what she was looking at. “Your tools,” she whispered.

“If the police were here investigating, they would find paint that matched the trim on the bathroom window right here on
my
chisel and sawdust from the underpin
ning of the beach stairs caught in
my
saw. It would look as though I jimmied the window and booby-trapped the stairs, and then tried to make it look like an accident. I would look guilty.”

He reached for the chisel, but Liz caught his hand. “Is it all right to touch it? What about fingerprints?”

“If there are any fingerprints on these tools, you can bet the farm they’re mine. More likely, they’ve been wiped clean. Whoever did all this would have worn gloves.” He recalled the gloves he’d grabbed from this bench the day before, the same ones that were now stuffed in the rear pocket of his jeans. He took them out now and stared at them, recalling how he’d had to all but peel them off his hands a few minutes before.

“Are these yours?” he asked Liz.

She looked confused. “No, they’re yours.”

He pulled one on again and flexed his fingers. Either his hands had grown since yesterday morning when he’d dug the fence post holes or the gloves had shrunk. “I don’t think so,” he said, taking the one off again and searching for a label of some kind. There was no identifying tag in either glove.

Was he wrong? Had they always been tight? Had wearing them out in the damp affected the leather? Or had the maniac who had rigged the stairs and broken Sinbad’s leg brought them along?

Then why leave them behind?

He spent the next several minutes looking for his own gloves, which meant he scoured the garage, searched out by the fence project as well as inside his truck, and all through the house. Back in the garage, he stared at the gloves on his workbench. They were either his or the would-be killer had taken the wrong pair.

They had to be his.

“What about the twine?” Liz said. “I threw the original bit down the bluff. It’s probably been washed away by now. But you don’t have twine out here, do you?”

He shook his head, then stopped, considering. Rummaging around in a drawer beneath his table saw, he found a spool of twine left over from the garden two years before.

“It’s green,” Liz said.

“It sure is.”

“The twine around Sinbad’s neck was natural colored.” She hugged herself and added, “Alex, I’m scared.”

He put an arm around her slender shoulders. “Nothing is going to happen to you, sweetheart. I won’t let it.”

“It’s not me I’m scared for.”

He kissed her hair. The honey colored strands were damp and felt cool against his lips. “Let’s go inside,” he said. “Let’s call the vet and see how Sinbad is doing. Come on, you’re freezing. I’ll make coffee.”

“Or hot chocolate?” she asked, looking up at him under a sweep of dark lashes. Her green eyes looked huge, and for a second he flashed back to the day before when she’d looked just like this as she glanced at him over her shoulder, the two of them dangling from a long piece of three-quarter-inch nylon rope.

He tried to think of someplace he could send her where she’d be safe until he figured out what was going on. She could stay with Emily.

Except, how would he protect her if she wasn’t by his side, day…and night?

“Hot chocolate it is,” he said.

“But first I need to call the vet,” she added, glancing at her watch. “It’s nine o’clock, they should be open now.”

B
EFORE SHE GOT
a call in to the vet, Ron Boxer called. Ever sensitive, he reacted to the stress even Liz could hear in her own voice. “Did I catch you at a bad time?” he asked. “Has something happened?”

“No, no.” She was surprised by how much she wanted to confide in him, but one look at Alex heating milk for her hot chocolate dampened the desire to spill her guts. She and Alex needed to discuss what information they shared before she said a word to anyone.

Ron pressed her. “Are you sick, are you hurt? Is it Alex, is something wrong?”

“Everything is fine,” she assured him. “As you know, this is a pretty difficult time around here, but we’re coping.” She suddenly thought of Alex’s observation about Emily trying to match her up with Ron and added a little self-consciously, “We’re working together. Me, Alex and Sinbad. We’re fine. What’s up?”

He gracefully let the matter go. “Considering everything else, this is going to seem trivial, but I was wondering about your plans for after you give birth. Jane said you weren’t coming back to work after the baby is born, at least not for a few months. I’ve got a franchised sporting goods outlet interested in the big empty department store space at the south end of the mall. Should I bring this up at our monthly meeting? Will you be here in January?”

Jane Ridgeway was Liz’s head of marketing. “Jane can handle it. I won’t be back in January though I’ll be in touch via e-mail and the phone and can come in if someone really needs me. Go ahead and work out the details with Jane.”

“Good enough. Get some rest.”

With that good advice, he hung up and almost immediately the vet’s office called. Liz talked to Dr. Kip
pling for a few moments, then gravitated to Alex and the delicious chocolate mixture he had concocted.

“Hmm, I love a man who can cook,” she murmured as he poured the hot chocolate into a mug and handed it to her.

“That’s me. Master cook, specialties coffee, soup and hot chocolate. What did Ron want and what did the vet have to say?”

She told him about Ron’s question, then added, “Dr. Kippling says Sinbad looks better this morning. She set his leg and said he licked a little food off the technician’s finger. If he keeps improving this way, we should be able to bring him home in a couple of days.”

Alex leaned against the counter, his hands wrapped around a mug of coffee. “He’s a tough little bugger.”

Liz felt herself smile for the first time in what seemed like days. He took care of that with his next statement.

“Someone is worried about what you know, so worried that they’re willing to risk everything to get you out of the picture.”

She felt a shudder go through her that the steaming chocolate couldn’t touch. He was right, she knew this.

“I’ve been thinking about it. It would be entirely too dangerous for someone to go down the stairs from this bluff. We could have seen him—or her. But someone could have come along the beach at low tide and climbed up to do the dirty work.”

“How would they get your tools?”

“The garage is unlocked. I’ve only been back two days and frankly, I don’t recall noticing either the saw or the chisel.”

“What did you use when you installed the chain on the front door the other night?”

“I used the tools out of the little box you keep in the
hall closet for fix-it projects. Except I went into the garage for the cordless drill, but that wasn’t on the workbench. Even if it was, I’m not sure I would have noticed anything missing. I left it midproject last spring when I was arrested. I hadn’t put things away properly.”